Sunday, April 24, 2005

Models, process and Zachman

John Daniels ran an interesting workshop on models and perspectives. I'm pretty familiar with the source material for this, namely Syntropy. However, John went on to talk about how you move from model to model and what the motivation for a model maybe.

Intent/Perspective

Conceptual

S/W Specificiation

S/W Implementation

Sketch

1

2

3

Blueprint

4

5

6

Program

7

8

9

We ended up with a table like the one above, where intention is orthogonal to the model perspective. John Daniel proposes that you can characterise a method by the cells it populates either fully or partially. e.g. XP is a 3,9 method or, as someone joked, a 9,9,9,9,9.... method ;-) I thinks this is not only an interesting way of thinking about methods but also a good way to look at enterprise frameworks such as Zachman. If we consider Zachman we can map the rows to perspectives. Columns however are tougher since they indicate content (Who, What, Where, When, How, Why). If we leave intent as it is in the above table we can map content as a 3rd dimension. This gives a cube that can be used to characterise architectural processes. In the cube, each cell can contain partial or complete coverage for 0 or more of the content prescribed in the Zachman columns.